Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

“Flag desecration” and “sanctity of marriage.” I’d also like to see a ban on using “football field” as a unit of measure, but I’m kind of a dreamer.

From Dahlia Lithwick’s piece:

Do you want to know what’s destroying the sanctity of marriage? Phone messages like the ones we’d get at my old divorce firm in Reno, Nev., left on Saturday mornings and picked up on Monday: “Beeep. Hi? My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? Room—honey what room is this—oh yeah. Room 407. Thank you. Beeep.”

It just doesn’t get much more sacred than that.

The idea that the government is involved in something “sacred,” and that it is this “sanctity” that justifies the denial of equal rights to marry, really rubs me the wrong way. After all, marriage, as far as the state is concerned, is a bundle of rights and responsibilities. Churches may see marriage as a sacred union of two souls — the Catholic Church treats it as a sacrament — but there’s a reason the priest invokes the power of the state when solemnizing the marriage — without it, the marriage has no legal effect. But you can hit a drive-through wedding chapel and have exactly the same effect.
Then there’s “flag desecration” — again, resting on the idea that the flag, in and of itself, is a sacred object. And the fun part is that the people who are most upset by “desecration” of the flag seem to have the least regard for the ideals which the flag is supposed to represent. Such as free speech:

Arrest reports show Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough went to the Kuhns’ home on 68 Brevard Road about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday to investigate a complaint of an American flag on display after being desecrated.

State law prohibits anyone from knowingly mutilating, defiling, defacing or trampling the U.S. or North Carolina flags. Lt. Randy Sorrells of the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office said the Kuhns desecrated the flag by pinning signs to it, not by flying it upside down . . .

Deborah Kuhn said an Asheville police officer stopped by last week to make sure the couple was OK, after recognizing the upside-down flag as a distress signal.

Asheville police calls for service records show an officer did go to the house July 18 after a complaint about the upside-down flag. The officer did not issue a citation or file a report.

A couple of days later, Deborah Kuhn said a man dressed in fatigues came to the door to “harass my husband” about the flag. Someone also took photos of the flag, she said.

Sorrells said a resident approached Scarborough while he was on duty and alerted him to the flag. Sorrells said he did not know where the person approached Scarborough or what the deputy was doing.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, Scarborough went to the Kuhns’ home and gave Mark Kuhn a copy of the flag desecration statute. Scarborough told the Kuhns the flag was being displayed illegally. . . .

[A scuffle ensued after the Kuhns took the flag down but refused to show ID and attempted to shut the door; the deputy broke into the house, got into a confrontation with the Kuhns, and called for backup.]

Sorrells said this is the first time he has seen the flag-desecration law enforced. He said it’s a difficult decision for an officer to weigh a resident’s right to free speech against another’s complaint of a law violation.

“I think the officer did the appropriate thing by stating his intention to simply issue a citation and let it be worked out in court,” Sorrells said. “If Mr. Kuhn had simply complied with that request for identification and accepted the citation, we would have all gone about our way, and it could have been worked out in court. Once he assaulted the officer, it escalated very quickly.”

If only they’d quietly accepted the violation of their right to free speech! If only they’d allowed the nice officer to cite them for exercising their First Amendment rights!

What both “sanctity of marriage” and “flag desecration” have in common, other than this whole sacredness idea, is that they’re nice little catchphrases, but there’s no there there. In both cases, the symbol — the word “marriage” or the piece of cloth — are privileged over the things that they represent. And, indeed, the people who are invested in defending the terms miss the point of the things they represent. So you get people siccing the law on their neighbors for expressing political opinion without stopping to think that maybe, just maybe, the right to dissent is one of those things that the flag represents, and that the free expression of that dissent is one of those things that makes the flag worth having.

And you get people who can’t abide having gay folks marry — or who will maybe be okay with civil unions, but by God, “marriage” is between a man and a woman! — but who refuse to see that quickie weddings in Vegas are probably a bigger threat to the “sanctity” of marriage than are the legal unions of committed and loving same-sex couples. And who, probably more out of religiosity than actual religious faith, natter on piously about sacred unions, blahblahblah. On that note, back to Lithwick:

The decision to make a marriage “sacred” does not belong to the state—if the state were in charge of mandating sacredness in matrimony, we’d have to pave over both Nevada and Jessica Simpson. We make marriage sacred by choosing to treat it that way, one couple at a time. We make marriage a joke by treating it like a two-week jungle safari. There is no evidence that gay couples are any more inclined toward that latter course than supermodels, rock stars, or that poor spineless bald man on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? There’s good evidence that most of them will take the commitment very seriously, as do the rest of us. There will be more “sanctity” in marriage when we recognize that people of all orientations can make sacred choices. Good for Massachusetts for recognizing that truth.